Copyright Reformers Do Not Advocate Plagiarism

If you are one of those folks who responds to any debate in the domain of copyright reform with one of the following responses (or some variant thereof), please cease and desist. You are revealing yourself to be a functional illiterate.

Oh, so according to you, anyone should be able to take something written by an author and just rip it off, right? [I’m presuming ‘rip it off’ means ‘use without attribution.’]

I should be able to take something you’ve written, change your name to mine and just sell it, right?

No. You may not. You would be a plagiarizer then. Folks advocating reforms of copyright laws–typically shorter copyright terms, more lenient understandings of the doctrine of ‘fair use‘ mainly–have never advocated plagiarism. They still don’t.

Copyright reformers do not advocate that copyright protections should not exist. They do argue, however, that these protections are sometimes extended to material that should not be copyrighted–for example the baseball statistics that are put into a particular format by an author should remain uncopyrighted while their new tabular format certainly should be; they also advocate that those terms of copyright should be limited–as originally envisaged in the US Constitution–so that the copyrighted material can serve as ‘raw material’ for other creators to build on, to modify. They also express concern that over-stringent application of copyright laws are sometimes problematic in the digital world in which we live today – one in which creative products can be more readily copied, modified, and distributed.

But they do not, ever, advocate that someone should be able to take someone else’s’ work and pass it off as their own.

This persistent misunderstanding of copyright reformers’ claims has two unsavory interpretations:

Critics of copyright reformers are lazy and illiterate; they cannot read, and if they can, they cannot be bothered to read the actual claims made by copyright reformers.

Critics of copyright reformers are intellectually dishonest, engaging in willful misreading in order to systematically misrepresent the reformers’ claims.

I pen this short screed today because this past Monday, my essay ‘End Intellectual Property,’ which argues that the term ‘intellectual property’ is a misleading piece of rhetorical excess and should be discarded in favor of the precise use of ‘copyrights’, ‘patents’ ‘trademarks’ and ‘trade secrets’ instead, appeared in Aeon Magazine, and almost immediately, many readers online made some version of the responses above. I’m left shaking my head. Especially as my essay included the following line:

And neither do copyright reformers argue that plagiarists be somehow rewarded; they do not advocate that anyone should be able to take a copyrighted work, put their name on it, and sell it.

‘Nuff said.

P.S: There are several other persistent misunderstandings–or willful misreadings– of copyright reformer’s claims making the rounds. As they have been for a while. Like vampires, they refuse to die. On those (‘so you think artists should not be paid for their work?’ and ‘how come your books are not made available for free?’), more anon.